Master of Whitestorm

  The dwarf considered her with acute and guileful eyes. "I see," he observed quietly. He poked a stubby finger into his cheek. "One half-dead mortal means so much to you, does he?" And he spun through the doorway as Ithariel pitched a vase at him.

  The crystal smashed harmlessly into panels of fast-closing oak. "Lady," admonished the dwarf from the far side, "like it or not, you have company."

  The portal reopened immediately. The Archmaster of the White Circle stepped briskly across the threshold, his expression bleak as a thundercloud. He took in broken fragments and the spray of strewn flowers, and then Ithariel's white face. He gave both their correct interpretation. An anger of chilling proportions settled over his features, and he shoved the door to with a thud that rattled the hinges.

  "You learned nothing, I think, in the years you spent as my ward."

  Ithariel raised her chin. "I learned the extent of my father's evil."

  "Your present folly matches that." The Archmaster's eyes turned pitiless as the shadowed side of a snowdrift. "What misguided instinct gave you the right to meddle with a problem too great for your seniormost peers? And was Tir Amindel's utter destruction not enough that you must risk entangling your life with that of a mortal man?"

  "He is Korendir of Whitestorm," Ithariel said. "And far less mortal than he seems."

  She crossed the chamber and knelt by the divan where her mercenary lay. The vibrant inner tension she remembered was absent, stilled now by enchanted sleep. Shallow gashes marred his face and hands. At his throat, the tarnished length of chain that once held her jewel of protection had seared a line of blisters across his collarbone.

  The Archmaster moved to stand at the shoulder of his ward; he, too, studied Korendir, but with less sympathy. "You repeat the failings of your father, Ithariel," he cautioned. "You reach for what you want without any thought for consequences. When you called this man into service, did you think what penalty he might pay?"

  Ithariel stroked the limp fingers, felt sword scars and calluses from the bridle rein. "He was brought up on suffering. Never has it proven his master."

  "The scourge of Majaxin's crystal might be abided, true enough, but at what cost?" The archmaster shook his head in sudden sorrow. "The mind I just set under spell has ranged so far from reason that only the immortal maker might call it back."

  Ithariel closed her hands around Korendir's sinewed wrist. "Neth and his angels won't be necessary. This man is one of ours, the lost heir of High Morien. As a baby he was spirited away before the demons overran Alathir. The servant who bore him later sickened and died of a fever, but the infant survived. He was found in the forest, half starved, by the widow of Shan Rannok's huntsman."

  "And you risked his life in Tir Amindel, knowing this?" The Archmaster's ire intensified. "Girl, I saw perfectly well whom I dragged off the back of Nixdaxdimo's prize stallion! Orame informed me that Morien's son had not died, years back. But this boy's life cannot be sheltered by any grace of inheritance. Think, child! If Korendir discovers his bloodline, how long do you think he will last? The Mathcek Demons lurk yet in Alathir's ruins. As Morien's heir, they would hunt and destroy him, and not a ward the White Circle could devise might keep him safe."

  "Are you saying he should have finished his days as a mortal?" Ithariel stood up heatedly.

  "Oh yes, Ithariel. Just that!" The Archmaster spun away with a swirl of sea-colored robes. "Morien's son should have been left to find happiness and marriage as others do."

  "Just what sort of life do you think he led?" Sure of her ground now, Ithariel shouted back. "Did you, or Orame, ever take time to know him?"

  The Archmaster paused by the doorway. He heard the pain in her outburst, but his manner stayed critical as flint. "That point is moot, foster daughter. Now hear what your actions will bring. Korendir of Whitestorm shall live out his natural days within the wardspell I have set. You will care for him as he sleeps. He will not be wakened into suffering, and if you think to spare him by granting him knowledge of his origins, the Council Major will be forced to cast judgment. Do not meddle with this man further, Lady. Or on my authority as Archmaster, I will sentence you to the same fate as your father."

  Ithariel went white to the lips. Auburn hair spilled in coils over her jerkin as she sank back and laid her cheek against Korendir. Her thoughts circled in turmoil, and she barely heard the door swing closed as the Archmaster left her presence.

  The dwarf Nixdaxdimo found her still by the mercenary's side when he returned from grooming the gray. He paused on the threshold, scraped his knuckles through a beard like tangled wire, then shut the door and sat with his back against the lintel. For a very long while he watched the tears trace down his mistress's cheeks and soak soundlessly into black wool.

  Finally he said, "Ach, lady, you should never have mixed your heart into this."

  Ithariel did not answer.

  The dwarf propped his chin on his fist and tried again. "It's my fault, too, remember? I was the one who gave the sword and the stallion to tempt yon man into service."

  Her fingers tightened in the cloth of Korendir's tunic; beyond that, she might not have heard.

  Nixdaxdimo's virtues did not encompass patience. He raised bushy eyebrows and stamped back onto his feet. "Gives me the sorrows, just looking at you. When you've had your fill of moaning over him, I'll come back."

  Ithariel raised her head and said something too low to hear.

  The dwarf folded muscled forearms and scowled. "Say that louder."

  "Get out," Ithariel repeated more succinctly, and with a grunt of disgust, the dwarf did.

  Left to herself, the enchantress looked down upon a face unrecognizable in tranquillity. The almost ferocious reserve that pervaded the man's conscious presence was banished completely in sleep; that more than anything reminded of violated trust. Korendir had never owned such peace in life. The irony wounded, that the ward-stone she had promised, that he had earned at such annihilating cost, might itself bring the key to his inner calm. Granted his most cherished desire, the Korendir who had ceded his past to her would have struggled to reconcile the conflicting passions that drove him. Allowed protection for his stronghold at Whitestorm, he would surely take his chance to win recovery.

  A lock of his hair had fallen and tangled in eyelashes that showed not a flicker of reflex; Ithariel smoothed the strands back. Only warm skin, and the steady strength of his heartbeat, established the assurance that he lived. The enchantress tried to imagine the future, as bright bronze hair slowly grayed. Scars and calluses and tan would fade away, while the face with its stern planes and angles would sag into characterless old age.

  Insanity would have been easier to endure.

  In its place, the passive sleep imposed by the Archmaster offered a penalty too severe for acceptance. That final, dispassionate judgment drove Ithariel down an avenue of alienated thought. The discovery at the end left her shaking. When Korendir's mind had been stilled, something irreplaceable had been lost. A thing was reft from her that years and grief could not forgive, nor any amount of pity console.

  Who else upon Aerith understood those most terrible personal memories he had bequeathed her?

  Ithariel cradled a hand that would never touch back. She kissed lips unequivocally deprived of feeling, and something inside her gave way.

  "There's another means to recall a mind from madness," she said aloud.

  That moment the door banged open. Intrusive as a plague of stinging insects, Nixdaxdimo burst in. "Almighty powers of creation, I was afraid you'd think of that!"

  Ithariel shot up straight as if slapped. "You interfering little pest! What are you talking about?"

  The dwarf advanced on bandy legs and stopped beyond reach of his mistress. "If—" he said succinctly. He paused, took a deep breath, then mastered the rest in a rush. "If I thought you'd ever get soft-headed enough to take a mate, I'd never have asked Megga to marry me."

  Ithariel returned a dubious frown. "Let Megga hear that, and you'l
l walk in the same boots you stand in."

  Nix solemnly regarded his feet, whose footgear wanted mending. "Well then, I'll thank you not to tell the old battle axe." Still staring at his toes he added, "All the same, you'd better not bond with that carrot-headed madman on your divan."

  Ithariel raised her brows in a manner not at all to the dwarfs liking. He hopped from one foot to the other and pulled his beard with both hands. "I knew it! You're serious. Oh Neth, but I knew it! Lady, on that score the Archmaster was very clear. You're making a terrible mistake."

  Now the enchantress returned a glare. "You rotten little pest. How dare you discuss my affairs, particularly ones that this moment are purest conjecture?"

  "Conjecture!" Nix ripped his hat off and threw it on the floor. "I like that! Lady, the Archmaster himself broached the subject. He saw the same stupid look on your face that I did. If you mistook him for deaf this morning, he sure wasn't blind this afternoon."

  Ithariel raked her fingers through her hair. Her gut was twisted into cramps, and her back ached from hours of sitting without a chair. "If I choose to mate, not even the council at Dethmark can forbid me."

  Nix wilted. He sat down heavily on the crown of his feathered hat and said, "No. But you're making a ridiculous choice." When Ithariel failed to respond, he set his elbows on the floor and rested his chin in his palms. "All hells. Telvallind Archmaster himself admitted you have the right. He just hoped you'd have better sense. Since you don't, he said to tell you that if the man Whitestorm will have you, and if you both survive, the White Circle has no choice but to disown you. And if the mortal refuses you, if he lives or dies insane, the council will pass judgment against you."

  Ithariel leaned her head against Korendir's black-clad shoulder. All of her fury drained away, and her eyes went soft with distance.

  "Oh, weep for an early frost," said Nix, disconsolate. "Megga and I shall end up housekeeping an empty tower, and without any regular exercise that stallion will make shreds of the garden."

  "Maybe," Ithariel returned. Very quietly she added, "Maybe you and Megga will do your sweeping and cooking in the hall at Whitestorm castle, and the stallion will be muscled fit to kill."

  Nixdaxdemo raised two fingers and bent his ears down. "Surely not." His words rang pessimistically glum. "Hates the sea, anyway, Megga does. Says salt winds bring her headaches."

  "Liar," Ithariel said faintly. After that, she did not move for what seemed an eternity of time.

  XIX. Whitestorm's Lady

  The dwarf Nixdaxdimo moped throughout the morning. As Ithariel fussed over elaborate preparations, she tripped over him twice, he hung so closely underfoot. Irked by the insults she received concerning clumsiness, the lady sent the dwarf out to bridle the gray for an errand in the ruins of Tir Amindel.

  "Go and recover the fragments of Majaxin's tallix," she instructed her surly servant. "And be careful of that horse, he's no longer yours."

  Nix perched astride a saddle whose flaps and assorted trappings chafed his ankles. His diminutive proportions made any use of stirrups impossible, and after much grousing, he removed the irons and thrust his feet through the empty leathers; he stayed astride by dint of two fists clenched tight in the blond mane. He might have bred and raised the mount he had provided Ithariel's mercenary, but like most dwarves, his admiration for horseflesh was aesthetic and did not extend to riding. Anything higher than a pony made him dizzy. "Be careful of my head, you mean." Nix returned a scowl. "A fall would smash all my bones."

  Ithariel turned the stud and smacked it into a trot toward the forest. "Be gone, you silly dwarf. You've tumbled off your bench drunk with ale too many times for me to think that any part of you is breakable."

  Nix howled a curse at her. He hauled without success on the gray's reins and vanished precipitously into the forest. Only his voice drifted back: "Bother and hell's demons, why didn't I choose to breed fish?"

  Alone in the glen before her tower, Ithariel felt the smile fade from her face. The ritual she had decided to attempt was never a step taken lightly. She knew apprehension, and fear, and self-doubt, but not regret. Each hour that passed confirmed that her choice had been foregone conclusion from the first. The man who lay sleeping in her tower was entangled in her life course; the absence of his conscious presence haunted her in a manner that had nothing at all to do with debt. For a White Circle initiate, that state of affairs offered few alternatives.

  Either she chose to bond, to twine her being with his in a manner irreversibly final, or she lived out her days with the knowledge she was only half alive.

  The Archmaster's warning was a just one; the joining of two living spirits should never be consummated in duty. This was no moment for uncertainties, and yet Ithariel's thoughts were torn with them. Korendir of Whitestorm might reject her. He might succumb to his madness, or he might sicken and die; in all cases, without redress, her fate would be tied to his own.

  Preoccupied with worries, Ithariel took no joy from the spring that quickened the forest, but returned to her tower and exchanged her girdle of pearls for a knotted leather belt. Then she fetched a basket from the kitchen, went out, and launched her painted boat upon the lake. She paddled to the meadows on the far shoreline and spent the day gathering roots, rare flowers, and herbs. When the swallows swooped down and chattered questions at her, she did not answer back; their aerial acrobatics for once failed to delight her. The lake sprite did not surface to share her berries and bread, nor did she eddy the water into ripples around the painted boat's keel when Ithariel ferried the laden basket homeward.

  Only one being within the enchantress's circle of influence remained impervious to her mood. The dwarf wife Megga awaited her mistress on the path before the front door. She had red cheeks and round fat arms, and hair like straw tied back under a polka dot shawl. "You left all the sausage I made, foolish girl. What man will have you if you're falling down hungry, and skinny as well?"

  Ithariel stopped. She switched her basket from her left hand to her right. "I'm not the only one who's distraught. Have you forgotten? Megga, I never eat sausage."

  The dwarf woman slapped her ample thighs. "Ach. So ye don't. But that's no excuse." She strutted back into the tower with a comical, rolling gait, her head turned sidewards in annoyance. "Sausage was for Nixdax, and he's off his feed because of you."

  "Well, I'm guilty then, and there's an end of it." Ithariel laughed; she could not help herself. The dwarves always messed up her priorities; nothing she tried ever stopped them. She flicked pollen out of the trailing ends of her hair and followed Megga inside.

  "That swordsman might be hungry when he's roused," Megga added hopefully.

  The thought of Korendir wakened inspired only dread; Ithariel firmly kept to practicality. With a tact acquired through years of dwarvish service, she seized upon her opening. "Then you'll help me get him moved."

  Megga shot a black look over her shoulder. "What's the hurry, mistress? His boots have already spoiled your best cushions."

  "Nix's doing, and proud he was of the feat, at the time." Ithariel dodged as the dwarf wife sailed into a jibe in the passage. The enchantress caught the plump finger which jabbed scoldingly at her middle and thrust it more usefully through the handle of the herb basket. "Let be, Megga. If I'm going to bond with a mercenary, I doubt velvet cushions will very long stay a priority."

  * * *

  Sundown splashed mottled light through the forest surrounding Ithariel's tower by the hour Nixdaxdimo returned. He had not hurried on his errand. The gray he turned loose to graze showed a coat unmarred by sweat, but the same could not be said of his rider. Weary, pale, and lacking his habitual ebullience, he dragged his way up the stair. Ithariel's living quarters stood empty; unsurprised, but disappointed nonetheless, the dwarf jammed his cap more firmly over his ears and tackled the next flight of steps.

  His mistress was busy in the topmost chamber, the one she used for magic. Megga attended her; reluctantly, as Nix could see by the set of his
wife's lower lip. Given another reason to wish he had not come home, the dwarf sat heavily on the threshold.

  Ithariel no longer wore her leather doublet and riding boots. Barefoot, robed in shimmering green samite, she traced runes in sand upon the floor with a small wooden paddle and a cone with a hole in one end. Nix took stock of the patterns already configured on black stone; the braziers with their bundles of aromatic herbs set up, but unlit, at the major and minor points of the compass. Centered in the circle lay the mercenary from Whitestorm, his clothing replaced by a pearlescent veiling of silk. Nixdaxdimo looked at the combed bronze hair, the closed eyes, and the spell-wrought stillness of the man's features. Then the dwarf stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and shivered in outright apprehension. No good could come of this. No good at all.

  That moment Ithariel looked up, and eyes as clear as sheet silver caught sight of him. "Nix. Did you bring the thing I asked for?"

  The dwarf stopped chewing his fingers. He pulled off his cap, which was weighted inside with something heavy, and lowered it with a clink to the floor. "Here." He met his mistress's gaze with visible unhappiness. "Lady, the Archmaster was not wrong. Let the Master of Whitestorm bide his days in sleep."

  Ithariel frowned. "Nix, don't make things difficult. I can't do that." She rose with a slither of robes, detoured around her spell patterns and knelt before her troubled servant. "Did something in Tir Amindel frighten you?"

  Miserably the dwarf shook his head. Words could not encompass the ruins he had crossed: the fallen, shattered towers, with attendant tangles of wadded cloth and broken flesh now picked at by scavengers. The aftermath of the cataclysm unleashed by Majaxin's tallix was a sight to wrack the mind with nightmares. That the man responsible had not whipped a certain stallion bloody through his frenzy of tortured flight defied credibility. Newly appreciative of the mercenary he had dumped on Ithariel's best divan, Nixdaxdimo forced courage and spoke.

  "If you have any pity at all, you'll leave Korendir his peace." The dwarf finished off with a look bleak enough to curdle milk.